The sort of debate that must have ensued in what was then West Germany during the Baader-Meinhoff period, is beginning to happen in the States. The balance between protecting the population (and the State) and freedom of individuals to go about their lives without oppressive surveillance.

Interestingly, Britain has been full of surveillance camera for years, and no one has really bothered.

Some advocates of anonymity explain that it’s just a tradeoff — accepting the bad uses for the good ones — but there’s more to it than that. Criminals and other bad people have the motivation to learn how to get good anonymity, and many have the motivation to pay well to achieve it. Being able to steal and reuse the identities of innocent victims (identify theft) makes it even easier. Normal people, on the other hand, don’t have the time or money to spend figuring out how to get privacy online. This is the worst of all possible worlds.

So yes, criminals could in theory use mixmaster, but they already have better options, and it seems unlikely that taking mixmaster away from the world will stop them from doing bad things. At the same time, mixmaster and other privacy measures can fight identity theft, physical crimes like stalking, and so on. Please see the tor FAQ on abuse for more information.

Tor FAQ first point is :

Doesn’t Tor enable criminals to do bad things?

Criminals can already do bad things. Since they’re willing to break laws, they already have lots of options available that provide better privacy than Tor provides. They can steal cell phones, use them, and throw them in a ditch; they can crack into computers in Korea or Brazil and use them to launch abusive activities; they can use spyware, viruses, and other techniques to take control of literally millions of Windows machines around the world.

Tor aims to provide protection for ordinary people who want to follow the law. Only criminals have privacy right now, and we need to fix that.

Some advocates of anonymity explain that it’s just a tradeoff — accepting the bad uses for the good ones — but there’s more to it than that. Criminals and other bad people have the motivation to learn how to get good anonymity, and many have the motivation to pay well to achieve it. Being able to steal and reuse the identities of innocent victims (identity theft) makes it even easier. Normal people, on the other hand, don’t have the time or money to spend figuring out how to get privacy online. This is the worst of all possible worlds.

So yes, criminals could in theory use Tor, but they already have better options, and it seems unlikely that taking Tor away from the world will stop them from doing their bad things. At the same time, Tor and other privacy measures can fight identity theft, physical crimes like stalking, and so on.

The problem with cyber is that your assets are not the weapons that you control. Your assets are the vulnerabilities of your actual and potential enemies. In order to know your enemies’ vulnerabilities you have to find out where they are, and once you have got hold of them you cannot afford to let go.

–Many popular Facebook apps are obtaining sensitive information about users—and users’ friends—so don’t be surprised if details about your religious, political and even sexual preferences start popping up in unexpected places.

–A government that said it’d be ‘strong in defence of freedom’ now wants to spy on everything we do online.

Patrick Hayes

Spiked Magazine 3 April 2012

Spiked is written by mainly former Marxism Today folk

It’s libertarian/contrarian – so you’ll get defences of things you’d think would not be defended. Many of these pieces are well worth reading to get the old grey cells going, even if you find you are on the other side of the argument. So, for example, you may well find a Spiked writer defending people’s right to smoke themselves to death, when you feel despite African farmers suffering, it would be far better overall to shut the tobacco factories down completely for the greater good (probably missing out the bit about how tobacco corporations push cigarettes onto African’s who haven’t got the medical services to sort them out when they get, say, severe bronchitis or forbid, cancer)